


Ultraviolet catastrophe

by Charles_Rockafellor



Category: Shrapnel (tank-based video game | Andy Geers | 2000)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Video Game World, Military Science Fiction, Military fiction, RAM cache thrashing, Science Fiction, Simulation Hypothesis, Video & Computer Games, Video Game Mechanics, Zeno's Paradox
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:27:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26971381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/pseuds/Charles_Rockafellor
Summary: Two forces face off in battle, neither given to failure. Time before time presses down heavily, but the war is unrelenting. Each side wearies, but cannot yield. To yield is to fail – until one side decides that if they can't win, then they can at least ensure that nobody will. After all: what's a little mutually assured destruction, between friends?𝑫𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝑳𝒊𝒌𝒆, 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑺𝒖𝒃𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒃𝒆! ❤️
Kudos: 1
Collections: Sci-fi, Singularity, War is Hell





	Ultraviolet catastrophe

Shrapnel lay everywhere around, for as far as Commander C. P. Allegro could see.

The old standby tools were useless – Death Ray had begun _healing_ the enemy, Fairy Dust now only reanimated dinosaur skeletons, Cow Bomb produced unpredictable results of all manner...

Their backs were to the wall – everyone's, both friend and foe alike.

Where had it all gone wrong?

He sat there, staring toward the horizon as the enemy trundled out their latest development.

He'd learned to be leery of them, knowing that they'd begun using unholy methods gleaned from strange aeons, things that man was not meant to know, weaponry that shot forth Glider automata – and even Glider Guns – in a never-ending cascade of Langolier-like patterns of force that converted all in their path and left only death in their wake, arcane devices that could swap the living for the dead, engines of harmonic symmetry that rotated and reflected physical locations between opposed forces, even exchanging nucleonic and leptonic contents to the point of fermionic collapse.

What madness, what new horror did they bring this day to the battlefield?

=====

The entity possessing the opposing forces sought only oblivion, and had at last seen its way through to just that.

The Fork Bomb.

Where these pathetic mortals had once devised a primitive approach, Flying Toasters rained down deadly slices of toast across their targets, the entity had seen the obvious path to its end – the end of all.

At last the system would be brought to its knees, and the key was laughably simple.

Resource management.

The generator was ready now. All that was needed was for it to produce a single toaster.

A special toaster.

The air humming with pent-up energies, the entity lingered, relishing the immediate future, but savoring this perfect, pristine moment. Dawn had just broken, a fitting metaphor for the era that it was about to unleash.

At long last, it pressed the button.

=====

Something had changed.

Commander Allegro could feel the air almost abuzz, thrumming on some practically subliminal level.

Lifting his field glasses and scanning the sky, he could just make out an incoming toaster. The enemy had made a mistake though, that much was evident in the trailing cloud of toast already streaming out behind it over their own forces.

Adjusting them to their limit – a nuisance, but everything was a trade-off – he could just make out the details.

Curious.

The toast wasn't falling down at all; in fact, as nearly as he could see, it seemed to be ascending very slowly.

_What in the world?_

The toaster popped off another round, and he could just about make out the details...

A chill ran down his back as he realized what he was seeing: the toaster hadn't popped out a slice of toast, or two, or more. It had popped out two other toasters.

Sure enough, even as he came to this realization and its significance, the _previous_ payload of two toasters each spat forth two more toasters, bringing their little cloud to a total of six toasters. He couldn't be certain of the details, given the distance, but one further fuse-timing back it appeared as if the third payload-cloud (presumably originally containing only two initial toasters), had now grown to something rather larger – eighteen in toto, if he were to hazard a guess. With each iteration tripling the local count, just those three sub-clouds alone came to twenty seven toasters, a small enough number to be sure, but with the triangular power of each sub-cloud outstripping even the sum of the squares after only a few iterations, the cloud's grand total aside, and with such small increments between each tripling... he looked back into the growing trail behind them all, and at the distance yet to be covered by the incoming lead toaster, thinking then of that space still behind him that the toaster would yet have to cover before at last fading into the boundary of the world.

His hands shook as he set down the glasses, a cold knot settling in his gut.

The exponential count alone was staggering as a pure scalar along the trail, much less as a tensor as the toasters continued their integral, but it was their minuscule negative mass that worried him more. Were they to simply drop to the ground along a normal trajectory, then they would soon enough fizzle to an end. Were they instead to rise ever upward at a rapid rate of ascent, then so to would they soon enough cease being a problem – indeed, being then nothing more than a mere delaying tactic as one awaited the toasters' ultimate demise somewhere in the cloud deck far above. This though, was another thing entirely. His forces were pinned down and must await their turn before counterattacking, and here these things stood in near-perfect neutral buoyancy, drifting lazily upward at a rate far slower than he could even estimate, doubling and redoubling.

Time stuttered, the world around him seeming to jump as if skipping a groove.

And so the ending had already begun.

How soon might it be? How soon was now?

Could one even apply such questions consistently?

As the threads of reality ate ever-increasingly toward the world's entropic limit, causal timing would begin to gnarl and kink, spaghettifying even as their temporal horizons receded from one another coformally – in fact, another shiver ran through the scene as he thought this, men and equipment now hopelessly mired in their travels, some ahead and behind where they would have been, some merged and dead in their tracks.

The scene stood for some extended-feeling period, as if frozen in place, a single flicker of flame unable to proceed in its course.

Another shake and all moved forward as it should for now, under what changes had already been wrought.

The cycles came more rapidly, lasting longer each time.

Trapped in each, Commander Allegro considered their fate.

Would it all ever end, or was this to be the new state of existence, a halving time that pressed onward toward an asymptotic limit, that next second in the future growing ever-closer yet remaining forever out of their reach... or would the universe itself simply–

**–**

**O ~~~ O**

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: After writing this, I did finally manage to dig up a copy of the game. It works fine in WIN 10, but I checked compatibility modes anyway: it malf'ed in WIN 95 mode, but is compatible w/ any of the later modes (with or without service packs); you'll also need to plunk the .dll into windows\system in order for it to run. If you do run it and find that you like it, you can edit the weapons' .wep files (or write your own) using Notepad – damage/healing scales like a clock, modulo 2^20 or something (it's been ~16+ years since I last mucked with it for fun, and all I did just now was test-run it), so damage above something like a million or so actually causes Hit Points to increase (that is: if you cause enough damage, you reach the modulo's negative extremum and tick right over into nearly the positive maximum HP), and vice versa for healing effects.
> 
> The Glider reference speaks to cellular automata. There used to be some good CA programs out there, and by now there are probably even better ones. My favorites were always [Mirek's Cellebration](http://www.mirekw.com/ca/index.html) (“MCell”) and Maydwell's [SARCASim2 and ARCALCA4](https://web.archive.org/web/20080524211204/http://www.bayarea.net/~maydwell/htdoc/ca/). I would normally have added a few flourishes of Langton Ants and SIPD (Spatialized Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, of which [Sergei Helfrich](http://prisonersdilemma.sergehelfrich.eu/) made [an excellent applet](https://github.com/Pygmalion69/PrisonersDilemma)) and [IPD](https://axelrod.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/all_strategies.html) (for which there's a beautiful aggregate simulator somewhere out there), to the story at that point, but didn't want to risk losing the MC's focus on general events.
> 
> This isn't an advertisement, I'm not associated with any of these programs, and I don't get paid for anything here. I just really liked these programs way back when, and figure that I should include the relevant info for anyone who might be interested.
> 
> <https://www.allegro.cc/depot/Shrapnel/>


End file.
